Joe Biden has no chance of winning tomorrow's Presidential election
If only we had another year or so to turn this around.
When Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States in January, 2021, just weeks after a Trump-crazed MAGA mob stormed the Capitol Building in a half-assed but nevertheless shocking attempt to violently overturn the election results, I breathed a sigh of relief because I assumed we’d seen the last of Donald Trump as a viable Presidential candidate.
Leaving aside the Beer Belly Putsch and the assorted scandals and screwups that marked his term in office, one-term Presidents simply do not get re-elected to a second non-consecutive term. Not since Grover Cleveland, anyway.
But here we are on the eve of Election Day 2023, and our nightmare is about to come true: an increasingly unhinged Donald Trump, plagued by lawsuits and serious criminal charges, surrounded by cultish acolytes so extreme and incompetent they’ll make the first Trump Administration look like Lincoln’s Team of Rivals, is almost certainly going to be re-elected President tomorrow.
Chris Cillizza surveys the gloomy landscape, in the process giving his newsletter a PG-13 rating:
There are a lot of ways to explain Biden’s problems but the best (and starkest) are his polls.
Here are just a few numbers to consider:
Biden’s job approval in the latest Gallup poll was just 37%, matching the lowest of his presidency. Just 75% of Democrats approved of the job he was doing, the worst he has done among members of his own party ever.
Just 23% of voters in a new Wall Street Journal poll say that Biden’s policies have helped them while a whopping 53% say the policies have hurt them. (By contrast 49% say Trump’s policies while in office helped them while 37% say it hurt them.)
More than 6 in 10 (62%) of voters in a new CBS News poll disapproved of how Biden is handling the economy
Not good. At all.
And then there are the head-to-head numbers with Trump — both nationally and in swing states.
Trump has led Biden in 11 out of the last 13 national polls, according to Real Clear Politics. The former president now has an average lead of 2.2% over Biden, according to RCP.
The picture in swing states is even worse for Biden.
CNN polls released Monday showed Biden trailing Trump by 5 points in Georgia and 10 points in Michigan. Those results echo findings from the New York Times and Siena College earlier this fall that showed Trump leading Biden in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.
It looks bad. Really bad. And what’s really depressing is that if Biden only had, say, another 11 months, he might be able to push ahead of Trump again - assuming Trump (or, for that matter, Biden himself) would even be on ballot were the election held in November, 2024.
In a completely hypothetical earth-two situation were the Presidential election was in November, 2024 instead of December, 2023, we’d have almost a year of more crazy, unpredictable events all over this crazy, unpredictable world, which could affect the election dynamics in any number of ways. It would also be another year for Donald Trump to keep talking and maybe, just maybe, say something that finally makes “soft” Trump voters decide he’s too far gone.
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